What makes Apple Pay revolutionary? How is it different than Google Wallet/PayPal?
Well, Apple Pay is NOTHING like google wallet. The iPhone 6 has a piece of hardware that stores your payment card info encrypted. Your bank has to be able to process Apple Pay payments because, when you pay with your phone, that security chip in the phone generates a one-time use token, sends that token via NFC to the Apple Pay enabled point of sale. The point of sale sends that token to the merchants payment gateway which sends it to your bank. Your bank decrypts the token into your payment information. From there, it is a normal payment.
So, it operates a little like public-private key encryption. Your bank holds the private key. The security chip holds the bank’s public key. ONLY the bank can decrypt the information and you have your own public key. But, more than that, your fingerprint (more biometrics coming later) is the password (the salt in encryption terms) to unlock that public key on the device.
This means, if you lose your phone, you simply deactivate the public key on the phone with find my iPhone.
Google Wallet works like paypal. It fronts the real payment info with a pseudo account which can still be stolen and used without authorization.

I’ve been meaning to start journaling for a while. I don’t want to keep a paper journal because, well, what if I want to put something private in my journal? I don’t want the whole world to see it. I think this might be a good project to work on. I have some good ideas for the short term as well as some ideas for future expansion.

So, recently, I was inspired to pick up some lost habits. Once again I shall take up the challenge to learn a new language.

Last year I refreshed my JavaScript knowledge. My overall evaluation of my experience with this can be summed up as “Meh.”

JavaScript is a powerful language. There is a lot to it, especially with the HTML 5 standards gaining momentum and the capabilities of today’s browsers. You can do a lot with it.

In the interest of learning with a purpose, my next language will not be simply an academic study of the language. I need a meaningful project to help guide my efforts. This project selection is as important as the language I select for the implementation.

Anyhoot…it got me thinking about how much I miss being in code all day/every day as a part of my job (my job as a senior developer is to develop/coach junior developers how to be better developers, NOT coding… 😦 ). And that got me thinking about a challenge I got from one of my mentors (like a hundred years ago!) to “learn a new language every year”. WOW! Now THAT was FUN!!

So, I decided to take up that challenge again this year and make it one of my “personal growth” goals for the year. 🙂 Now I just need a new language…or even an aspect of a language that I already know…to work on. Here is my mental list:

The list is the author’s top 5 favorite Java web application frameworks so I would, naturally, expect the list to be completely subjective. While I disagree with the order of the list (naturally, my list would be subjective as well 🙂 ), I agree that 4 of the 5 listed are in the top 5.

The one framework that I found surprising that made the list is JBoss Seam. I haven’t really heard anything about that for a couple of years. The one thing I remember that I liked about Seam was the Conversation context that it introduced and that I thought would have been a compelling reason for Seam to take off, but, as far as I can tell, never did. Unfortunate.

The one framework that I found surprising that did not make the list was JavaEE. Especially with the new version that is, now, very lightweight and streamlined for enterprise and web application development. I found it a little curious that it did not make the list. Hmmm…

With that said, I now give my own list of my top 5 favorites in order of preference. I would like to preface this list by saying how difficult I found it to choose between #1 and #2 and the reason I put Spring MVC at #1 is because that is where I have more experience than with JavaEE6. However, I fully anticipate that to change as I write more systems in JavaEE6. I have started seeing a lot of bloat in the Spring space lately and I don’t necessarily like what I’m seeing.